Properties of Knowledge Matter: A Re-Examination of the Glitz of Entrepreneurialism as a Change Paradigm for Higher Education

Background

Universities have increasingly been brought into the center of economic, political and national discourse within the past thirty years as new modes of educational agency are advanced in the twenty-first century “knowledge” economy. The shifting of roles and institutional purposes – previously held to as domains of academic and disciplinary inquiry into knowledge - seeks to configure a new paradigm in which economic market principles and theories underpin the conceptual, institutional and cultural architecture of the “entrepreneurial” university (Rosenberg, 2003, pp. 113-140; Thorp & Goldstein, 2010). While some welcome this emerging schema as a necessity for renewing and refocusing the purpose and role of universities in contemporary society, others consider the damaging effects of unilateral compliance to economic imperatives and the impact on institutional cultures of collegiality, values and academic practices (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004; Lambert, Parker & Neary, 2007; Braunerhjelm & Henrekson, 2013). Under the rubric of entrepreneurialism, new forms of institutional agency and identity are being shaped in characterizations of innovation, creativity, adventurism, opportunism and self-autonomy in promoting aspirations of institutional mobility and strengthened associations between higher education and capitalization of knowledge (Laredo, 2007; Bonaccorsi & Daraio, 2007).